How 'Social' are Social News Sites? Exploring the Motivations for Using Reddit.com

Social news sites allow their users to submit and vote on online news stories, thereby bypassing the authority and power of traditional newspaper editors. In this paper we explore what motivates users
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Social news sites allow their users to submit and vote on online news stories, thereby bypassing the authority and power of traditional newspaper editors. In this paper we explore what motivates users of social news sites, such as Reddit, to participate in this collaborative editorial process. We present a tiered framework of motivational factors for participating on social news sites, based on a comprehensive literature review, drawn from fields like social media research, sociology, (social) psychology, and behavioral economics. We then validate this framework through a survey deployed on Reddit and use the results of this survey to focus the motivational framework for the social news domain. The recreational value of the information posted to Reddit, along with the powerful possibilities for customization appear to be the most powerful incentives for using Reddit. Perhaps surprisingly, the social aspect of social news sites is not a motivating factor for the majority of Reddit users. Influencing the placement and reception of news stories in their niche communities of interest is what draws people to sites such as Reddit.

9.
Introduction
• Social news sites allow users to submit, discuss, and vote on
news stories and websites
- Popular alternative to online newspapers →
was 68th most
popular website in the world in January 2014 according to Alexa
• But what motivates users to participate on social news sites?
- Is it the power to help determine which stories make it to the front page?
- Or the possibility to contribute news stories?
- Or perhaps the social aspect of connecting and discussing with like-minded
users?
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14.
Survey development
• Empirical validation of motivation framework through a survey
• Survey consisted of six parts
- Activity level
‣ Reddit user proﬁle, active voting/commenting/posting behavior?
- Four parts, corresponding to each of the four top-level categories
‣ Questions corresponding to each of the 26 factors
‣ Open comment ﬁelds were included after each of these ﬁve parts
- Demographics
‣ Gender, age, country of origin
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29.
Discussion
• People use Reddit to be entertained!
- Recreational value combined with the customization possibilities and the
amount of information on Reddit are valued most by its users
• So how ‘social’ are social news sites? Answer: not very!
- Social motivators consistently valued as (relatively) unimportant
‣ Especially true for friendship-related factors
• Difference between online newspapers and social news sites due to
inﬂuence over reception and placement of news stories
- Massive effort put into all kinds of social features might be misguided...
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30.
Discussion
• Possible caveat
- Survey participants were more active than should be expected!
- Lurkers are most likely underrepresented in our survey
- However, social features require the most effort of all factors
‣ Lurkers are probably even less likely to be motivated by social factors!
• Future work
- Thorough content analysis of the comments collected
- Triangulation of our ﬁndings by crawling interaction data for 86
participants who allowed their Reddit activity to be crawled
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